Continued from Part 1...
Running off the temporary splice, all appears to be okay. The flow of electricity has been constant since the patch was installed. Till the field crews show up this will have to suffice.
Then around 2pm I lose power at the laptop. Strange, three quarters of the house is down but the kitchen and livingroom remain supplied'. Yvette and I summon PG&E again.
Joe returns at 2:30. The underground line to 1379 Northwood Drive (our nextdoor neighbor) is out, but the temporary splice is still drawing limited energy for 1385 (our residence). Alfred Pulonco, our neighbor, now totally without electricity, has also contacted PG&E.
Joe decides to leave the splice in place so that 1385 will not be completely in the dark. He does show me the master power switch used to shut the meter down should any major disruption occur. A second step-up in the case will bring the crews tonight.
4:30pm sees Joe depart and 4:55pm has Ken of JB's High Voltage arrive. He's here to mark the street and to assure Yvette and I of the ETA of the crews (both contactors to PG&E). They are about an hour to an hour and a half away and enroute from their prior job.
Ken takes off at six.
Minutes later, a lone, non-company truck drives up and is joined by a public works vehicle from the City of Fairfield. The two occupants meet at the junction box across the street and after a little discussion the public worker leaves. The time is 6:15pm
7:15pm: At long last, the field crew arrives to join that lone occupant of the truck. Holy moly, they are many! There must be no less than five possibly six big work trucks, representing JB's High Voltage, Inc. and Henkels & McCoy West LLC. The vehicles disgorge around ten crewmembers. (One even brings his five children with him!)
That mystery man? It turns out, he's the onsite representative from PG&E, He spoke little and smelled a great deal of cigarettes (though I never saw him light up once the entire night). Hmm.
The crew gets to work, locating the trouble almost immediately. It's under a tiny rose bush in our front yard and near to the side fence and mailboxes shared by our neighbor and we. Placing the dug up plant in a wheel barrel, the workers use high pressure water nozzles to spray open a four foot hole in the dirt which they suction using a high power vacuum aboard their big bruiser of a truck.
I mingle among the workers with their permission taking photos and videos of the absorbing field repair.
Dominic of Henkels & McCoy West (he's the one who brought his kids with him) uses my camera to take a close-up for me of the particular damage the crews hove found.
He explains the "burnout" they uncovered. It was all due to a bad splice the construction people made when they hooked up both 1379 and 1385 Northwood Drive to the main, PG&E underground, electrical line some thirty-three or more years ago! The resultant short, decades later, took out twelve to eighteen inches of electrical line. Gone completely was the section!
Whoever the developer hired back in the nineties to do the hook-up, has, according to Dominic, so far resulted in forty or so such burnouts in the Cordelia Hills home development of which we are a part. it's almost endemic to our community. Luckily for us, the neither the front tree or the the fence was the cause for the burnout. Though early on they were both under suspicion, neither will be impacted.
by 9:15 pm the personnel expertly replace and hook the cables, fully restoring electric power to both homes. "Lovingly" they replant the tiny bush and with that, all is done.
The only snag to occur at all was a tree limb that snapped across the street having accidentally latched onto one of the departing trucks. The branch had to be sawed off and discarded.
Photos and videos:
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| The crews acted like the job was one big get-together! |
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| About twelve to eighteen inches of braided wire are completely gone! Photo courtesy of Dominic |
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| A souvenir clip of one of the burnt-out electrical lines. |
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| It only two the crew two brief hours to do the entire job and restore Christmas cheer. |
The following day, Joe came out once more to close out the work order the crews, the PG&E guy, or PG&E itself, forgot.
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